Biography

The art of Los Angeles-based Llyn Foulkes challenges assumptions about the very foundation of contemporary culture, calling into question the ubiquitous influence of corporate America and the manipulative power of professional advertising. Yet, while his work may at times appear to be pessimistic, Foulkes retains a romantic vision, not unlike his late-colleague and friend, assemblage sculptor Edward Kienholz. Foulkes believes that art has the power to change society by revealing social and cultural truths that may be unpleasant and difficult to acknowledge, but that are constructive in intent.

Foulkes was born in 1934 in Yakima, Washington, where he grew up with his mother and grandparents. He enjoyed a steady introduction to the arts throughout his childhood and early adolescence, developing a special interest in painting and music. During his teen years Foulkes discovered the musical comedy of Spike Jones, which inspired him to form his own vaudeville troupe and travel the Pacific Northwest playing what he calls “cartoon sounds in cartoon music.”1 This experience set the stage for the wry humor that would later surface in his artwork. After high school he continued to pursue his love of music and art at the University of Washington, Seattle. He later transferred to Central Washington College of Education in Ellensburgh before joining the United States Army, where he served two years as a clerk typist for the medical corps in Germany. After his discharge from the army, Foulkes moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in Chouinard Art Institute. At that time, abstract expressionism was the favored style, but while Foulkes learned to manipulate the formal elements of abstraction, he remained unconvinced that the movement was conducive to his goals as an artist. Following graduation in 1959, he began to incorporate elements of collage and assemblage into his work and to introduce personal and autobiographical references. He was fascinated by the loss and destruction he had witnessed after the war as America’s presence was felt throughout Europe, and was intrigued by the aspects of American history and culture that had enabled the country to position itself as a dominant world power. Over the next several decades, the scope of Foulkes’s vision narrowed as he began to concentrate on his diatribe of corporate America.

In 1973, Foulkes adopted Mickey Mouse as a “metaphor for the trivialization of American life and values.”2 Since then, the cartoon mouse has come to represent the shortfalls of modern society ranging from the moral degradation of American youth to the national desire for conformity encouraged by large corporations and widespread advertising. The Corporate Kiss is a prime example of the artist’s treatment of such themes. In this mixed-media portrait, he created a forceful statement about the proliferation of mass marketing and gross commercialization that pervades American culture. Like many other artists, including Enrique Chagoya, Sandow Birk, and David Gilhooly, Foulkes draws attention to the infiltration of corporate America into world culture through the guise of the seemingly innocent cartoon mouse—in this case, perched on the artist’s shoulder. The Corporate Kiss, like many of his other works, questions where such a powerful force belongs, how far it should be allowed to go, and to what extent it should be monitored. Foulkes sees the encroaching corporate takeover of America, symbolized by the figure of Mickey Mouse, as an example of the failed American dream and the ways in which it is continually exploited through slick packaging and subtle brainwashing.

While Foulkes’s work is fiercely polemical, however, it also speaks to the artist’s genuine concern for our culture and our future. In The Corporate Kiss, Foulkes concedes that he, too, is susceptible to the powerful influence of Mickey as an emblem of joy and capriciousness. The piece testifies to Foulkes’s ambivalence toward the Disney character—he finds Mickey seductive but to succumb to the mouse’s charms would be to endure the betrayal of what Foulkes calls “an entertainment consumer society with no apparent end.”3 Through the vehicle of this seemingly harmless character, Foulkes confronts what he sees as the insidious power of corporate America. —L.W.

1. Llyn Foulkes, quoted in Marilu Knode, “Llyn Foulkes and the American Dream,” Llyn Foulkes: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Los Angeles: Fellows of Contemporary Art, 1995), 12.
2. Ibid., 16.
3. Artist’s statement, n.d.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)


Active in Topanga, California (Getty ULAN 2013)

Born in Yakima, Washington in 1934, Foulkes attended the Chouinard Art Institute from 1957 to 1959. He has been exhibited widely in institutions such as the Laguna Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Art, among others. His work is held in numerous museum permanent collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angles County Museum of Art; and the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA; and the Oakland Museum of Art. This will be the first work by Foulkes to enter SJMA’s collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2002)

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